What hope is there when even supposedly learned people such as a “conservative” Supreme Court judge can be so dead wrong, so ignorant that he does not know the difference between a physically real natural person and legal fiction?

Corporations and other such fictitious entities are NOT natural persons. There is no separate physical, biological entity we can point to and say, THAT is Mr. General Motors, THAT is Mr. Auto Workers Union, THAT is Ms. Super PAC for Obama. Their parents obviously had a strange sense of humor for giving them such names, but there they are. The physical reality is that there is no certificate of marriage between a physically, biologically real Mr. Motors and a Miss Buick or Pontiac or Chevy or Delco or whatever, who have “consummated” their marriage and produced a natural born baby christened General, with his own unique birth certificate, baby foot prints and DNA. .

All these entities are legal fictions, nothing more than voluntary associations between natural human persons. The reason we call them “incorporated,” the reason we call the act of forming them “incorporation,” is that, as the roots and the meanings of the words clearly show, we are endowing these fictitious entities with certain legal rights and attributes normally reserved to natural “corpuses.” Each natural person who is a member of such a fictitious entity performs legally defined duties, acting in the name of the fictitious entity, whether his specified role is as executive, manager, employee or contractor. Every single member of a fictitious entity already has his full complement of constitutional rights, by virtue of the fact that he is a natural person.

So, by giving fictitious entities separate individual constitutional rights, such as those specified in the First Amendment, what the Court has done is double the civil rights of the MEMBERS of the fictitious entities — once as the natural persons that they are, and a second time as members. This is blatantly discriminatory against natural persons who are not members. Anyone exercising these rights in the name of the fictitious entity can in fact appear to have special powers and rights in proportion to the number of members, which is of course one of the very reasons for forming it in the first place.

In the Citizens United case, the Court could have done the right thing and declare that only natural persons have constitutional rights. Businesses, unions, political action committees, parties, clubs, etc., consist of natural persons and they already have their own individual constitutional rights. The Court could have ruled, for example, that the principals in the PAC, such as the CEO and major donors, must be identified in their political ads, so the voters would know who is paying for the diatribe — George Soros, the Koch brothers, etc. But the Court went the other way.

What’s next, fictitious legal entities will also have the right to vote? If a fictitious entity has First Amendment rights, why not also the right to vote? How many votes will it be entitled to? In the bad old days, when women and juveniles did not have the right to vote, and only the father in the family cast his vote, he still got only one vote, no matter the size of his family. Will the Court rule some day that a fictitious entity also be entitled to one vote? Why just one; why not one for every executive position and one more for each major financial backer? How many votes does Obama get, for acting as POTUS and therefore the head of the executive branch with millions of uniformed and civilian employees? or does he get one vote for each adult citizen, or one for each of the 300+ million residents? Once we enter this theater of the absurd, the sky is the limit….